Apple Cider
by Devi-Yosh
Summary: Berry Punch has been drinking apple cider for as long as before she could even remember, and it's just now taking its toll. She hates apple cider, but she can't escape the clutches of the alcohol within the beverage, and it tortures her every day...


Nopony needs to tell me I have a problem. I know I have a problem. Sweet Celestia, do I know!

What's this problem? Well... It's recovering from my addiction to cider and grape juice, but mainly cider.

I don't remember how it all started myself, but I do know what my dad told me. My mom - who's currently in prison for drunk air balloon driving - was and still is an addict.

Her alcoholism was pretty bad. She would often imagine my dad as some sort of monster in her hammered state and lash out at him. Unfortunately for him, she was a unicorn while he was just an earth pony, so he had no real defense against my mom's attacks.

Anyway, it got to the point that my dad had to tell Mayor Mare about mom's behavior, and she threatened to send her to Ponyville prison if she didn't dispose of the rest of her alcohol in three days. _Not_ drink them, throw or dump them out.

And one of her ways in disposing of her alcohol... was replacing my apple juice for apple cider in my baby bottle. I was a baby at this time, so I couldn't truly tell the difference between juice and cider. I was also apparently force-fed it, even going so far as to wake me up in the dead of night one night and force me to "dispose of" her alcohol for her.

I ended up drinking so much cider that I fell intoxicated at the age of two.

My foalhood was pretty awful because of this. I would constantly ditch school, claiming I had an illness, and sneak cider away from Sweet Apple Acres by the barrel. Of course I was eventually caught by Applejack one weekend when I went to go play with her, and she just _had_ to tattle to her brother and grandmother, and then they just _had_ to tattle to mom and dad. I don't think a seven-year-old filly could have ever gotten as hard a beating as I did...

In my teenaged years, I was finally able to get a job at Hay Burger an earn bits - which I used only for buying cider. I was a manipulator like my mom, so I found plenty of ways to get cider: pay somepony else to buy me some; disguise myself as a full-grown mare; buy some when nopony was looking... I even went so far as to blackmail Applejack for it, and I still feel so terribly guilty for doing that to my friend. I've never seen Applejack so terrified, and that was part of the reason why she decided to move away to Manehattan to live with her Aunt and Uncle Orange. Luckily, though, I forgot what I even blackmailed her for, so nopony ever knew the dreaded secret.

Finally, I _somehow_ managed to graduate high school at the age of nineteen, and I was practically forced to endure not having cider for a long while, all because I was a year older than everypony else in my class. And that wasn't even my fault! It was my mom's for sending me to school a year late because she was too drunk to remember when to send me, and now she's blaming _me_ for _her_ mistake?!

Well, I suppose that doesn't matter anymore now. Two years later, I became twenty-one: the legal age for ponies to drink cider and grape juice. And if I wasn't intoxicated as an infant, Celestia knows I was intoxicated ten fold in just one week after turning twenty-one.

Eventually, when Applejack's sister Apple Bloom was old enough to help the rest of her family harvest apples to make apple cider, they decided to stop producing it altogether with the exception of the middle of summer during cider season. Obviously, I couldn't live without cider for that long, so I began stealing cider from my mom. There was still also grape juice, but that didn't give me nearly as amazing a buzz as cider did.

And once mom didn't have anymore alcoholic drinks for me to steal, I'd go straight back to Sweet Apple Acres and bribe Apple Bloom this time to secretly make cider for me. Applejack once told me she knew how to make it on her own, even though she does it easier with the rest of the Apple Family helping out. I didn't care, though, I wanted apple cider. Buck that, I _needed_ apple cider!

So yeah, long story short, I did practically anything and everything to get my hooves on apple cider. But as time went on - which was actually a few months later because I drank cider that often - I began to dislike its taste. I no longer liked apple cider. This devastated me at first, but I figured it might as well be for the best. Even though I never knew of a life without alcohol maybe I could write a new chapter of my life alcohol-free.

But that's just it. I didn't stop drinking. I couldn't stop drinking, no matter how badly I wanted to. My body lived mostly off of apple cider, and to stop drinking it was like taking away the horns from unicorns or the wings from Pegasi. I just couldn't stop... and it was like living in Tartarus, it was that bad.

Finally, Twilight Sparkle recommended I went to Fillydelphia and go to rehab. I didn't know what that was at first, but after reading a book she gave me I learned it was a place ponies with the disease of addiction went to recover and stop drinking and using drugs, or at least heal a few scars. So I took her advice and went for about three months, and once I returned I felt cured... at least for a little bit. Almost immediately I relapsed because it was currently cider season.

I hate apple cider. I absolutely hate it. I hate the taste, I hate the buzz it gives me, I hate what it looks like... I even hate the way the words sound! _Cider._ It sounds so... vicious.

But I couldn't stop. My body wouldn't let me. The reptilian section of my brain was diseased - at least that's what Twilight and Dr. Stable said. I was forever contaminated. There was no going back. There was no curing the disease. The only thing I could do was try not to relapse, and it's so much harder than it sounds.

Think of it this way if you don't know what I'm talking about. Alcoholism is like a punch to the face. It's extremely difficult not to flinch when somepony rears back to punch you. Hard not to yelp, back away, tense up, even blink. You have to keep absolutely still as if nothing was happening, like trying to keep from drinking any cider or grape juice.

But if you flinch... you drink. And I'm a coward at heart so to speak, so I'm always flinching... and always drinking cider...

The worst part is, the disease isn't just the word addiction. It seems to also be some sort of being. The disease talks to me. It disguises itself in my own voice in my mind, as if I were talking to myself in my head. It pretends to be me. And I never know if my thoughts are me talking or the disease. It's scary when you think about it... And it's really scary to me.

I hate apple cider so much... I hate it even more than Pinkie Pie loves making her friends smile... But the one thing I hate more than apple cider... is my mom for intoxicating me as an infant...

I hate her... I hate her with a burning passion... I hope she rots in prison and her corpse is fed to Cerberus in Tartarus...

There is one last thing I can say from all this... And that's I'll never eat another apple for as long as I live...

* * *

**A/N: Just to let you all know, I didn't make this story because I'm an alcoholic. I made it because someone who is very close to me is, and they're constantly struggling with getting people to understand that they don't make the choice to drink; they're tricked, they're forced, they have no choice. They may try everything they can, but at the end of the day, it's nothing but an endless battle... and the disease always wins in the end...**


End file.
